Prof. Elies Molins Asociación de Personal Investigador del CSIC - Spain INES-WFSW Seminar Berlin, May 31st, 2007

South of Europe The center of gravity of the scientific knowledge has moved from East (China, Persia, Egypt) in old times to Europe and, more recently, to US and Japan. Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece (SIPEL) gave important contributions to science and technology. Think on mathematics, navigation, medicine, architecture, etc. Specially in the XX century, lots of SIPEL researchers developed their careers outside his country of origin.

Four types of indicators Human resources in R&D and attractiveness of S&T professions Public and private investment in R&D Scientific and technological productivity Impact of R&D on economic competitiveness and employment

# researchers Most of the data from EC report: “Key Figures 2001, Towards a European Research Area” Show departure points and tendencies. SIPEL: Less than 4 per 000 workforce. 1.- HUMAN RESOURCES

Business Enterprises Government Institutions Higher Education Greece Italy Portugal Spain EU US Japan Number of researchers (1999). 3rd European Report on S&T Indicators, 2003

growth of # res. Although a higher growth (except Italy), the convergence is slow due to a large absolute difference.

Correlation between investment and # of researchers

PhDs growth Lots of them stabilize outside (brain drain). Currently, # of students decrease in science careers (specially physics, but also chemistry, geology, maths, but not biology).

R&D investment SIPEL far from EU… EU far from US & Japan Tremendous effort is needed (EU 3% in 2010) 2.- INVESTMENT IN R&D

R&D investment growth Good rates… but enough ? (perhaps for Portugal) Experts consider that R&D growth should be 5% more than GDP growth.

%R&D industry Innovative effort of industries Public effort should be followed by an increasing R&D effort of industries.

…and tendency Heterogeneous results on the growing of the R&D industry investment: different industry structure (i.e. SME based) or different administration policies.

Public investment SIPEL: not so bad respect to EU. EU far from US and Japan.

Public R&D growth EU growing is slower than US and Japan increasing R&D budget.

Military R&D Spain has included some defense budgeds in R&D to improve figures. Large in US

Venture capital Investment per 000 Gross Domestic Product.

Patents per inhabitant SIPEL at the bottom… (also for US patents) but Greece and Spain have larger growing rates the EU average. 3.- Scientific & Technological Productivity

# publications Lowest in the # per inhabitant, but also very high per growth annual rate.

Highly cited papers

Public-private cooperation Technology transfer Simbiotic relationship Always a challenge 4.- SOCIAL IMPACT

High-tech employment Also an indication of the innovation capacity.

Knowledge Intensive services employment Tendencies inverse to current situation: slow convergence.

% of high-tech exports Enhancement of EU due to intra-EU trade Japan decreasing (-8%)

Others Erawatch: similar or improved tendencies Slow convergence of SIPEL to EU Bologna impact + lower interest for science and technology formation What about EU convergence to US&Japan? Convergence is sustainable?

Pushing new politics about financial benefit FOR SOCIAL BENEFIT

For discussion The demography expansion together with the improvement in quality of life implies an application of a sustainable development model everywhere. This is a real challenge for the R&D system.